Hearts Out To Dry
by Juliedoo
Summary: Byakuya and Rangiku: experts on throwing up in gardens and being left behind. One shot.


-oOo-

Vomiting all over Kuchiki Byakuya's spiffy, compulsively organized garden wasn't something she was very proud of in retrospect, but she'd thrown up in worse places.

Besides, the whole thing had gotten her a new drinking buddy, and she could always use another one of those. Alcoholism wasn't such a big, intimidating word when other people were getting sloshed right alongside you.

Getting so drunk she couldn't remember her own name was a familiar crutch, comfortable as an old sock. Facing her problems head on? Pfft. No thank you, sir. She had too many scab wounds and no urge to pick at them, however unhealthy all the psychologists said that compartmentalizing issues was. What did they know, anyway? The man that they'd loved-and-hated hadn't run off to a castle in the desert with a traitor who harbored illusions of grandeur and made megalomania seem like the world's biggest understatement. At least the bland wardrobe of unrelieved white and the stupid looking mullet was a step up from the nerd glasses, but fuck Aizen, anyway. With a stick.

And then, after Gin (damn him, why did he he _do _it) had suitably mind fucked her in the middle of a war to determine the fate of the world, he'd gone off and died in front of her like some sort of cliché antihero in a tragic, pithy paperback novel. Slumped against a broken piece of building, using the rubble as a concrete pillow, his arm ripped out of the socket, mouth leaking blood like a messed up faucet. And his eyes (so beautiful, like blue daisies or clear water in a mountain stream) had been half lidded, glassy, staring up at her with a defeated sort of acceptance. _Didn't wanna see you cry no more, Ran-chan_, she could hear him say at the bottom of the third bottle.

It was only the second time she'd seen his eyes. The second and the last.

So, yeah, she was going to get drunk.

She poured Kuchiki another shot and flopped back on the veranda, spilling a little _sake _out of the rim of her cup. The moon was swollen and pale in the void sky like a dead, bloated face, and the stars were swallowed by the night colored clouds. A humid breeze ruffled the leaves of the cherry tree drooping over the placid _koi _pond, and the bamboo chimes dangling from the rafters overhead clacked together woodenly. Rangiku stared up at the dead, dead moon as if it knew something she didn't.

"Do you ever hate her?" The question was only a bit slurred. She didn't look at the man sitting painfully upright next to her, calmly draining his glass as if he were conducting a tea ceremony instead of knocking back the booze with _Seireitei's _biggest lush. "For leaving you behind?"

He was quiet for so long that she figured he wasn't going to answer. She and Kuchiki were too different to have normal conversations. No common interests, their morals and sense of propriety operated on completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and they'd come from two very dissimilar places. He'd never known what it was like to freeze to death in Winter and faint from hunger, the type that made your stomach want to eat itself because it was so starved, and she'd never had expectations shoved down her throat to the point where she had to shit out her own hopes and dreams, had never had the weight of twenty eight generations pressing down on her shoulders. But they'd both had half their souls carved out with a rusty knife and buried under hell deep graves marked _Gin _and _Hisana_.

"There are days," he admitted quietly. "That I wish I'd never met her at all."

Her head lolled to the side as she glanced over. His hair was loose, no sign of those weird metal doohickeys, and his back was propped against one of the posts framing the veranda, his slate eyes fishing in the darkness for things she didn't know and couldn't fathom. He'd exchanged his stiff _shihakusho _for a plain lounging _yukata_, and in that moment he didn't look like the rigid captain of the sixth division or the aloof Head of the Kuchiki Clan. He was just a tired man with a young face and an ancient stare.

"But then, if she hadn't been in my life, I wouldn't be who I am now. I wouldn't have hurt, perhaps, but I wouldn't have loved, either." He was uncharacteristically verbose, his tongue loosened by the sturdy drink, no chink in his outward granite composure except for a slight flush to his cheeks, a miniscule slump in his proper posture. "So I've learned to accept the good with the bad."

"Mmm." Rangiku drained her glass. It slid like lava down her throat, burned. "I hate myself, because after all he did I still loved him. Still thought there was something in him that was worth saving, that he was still that little boy that had found me half dead in the middle of nowhere and fed me a dried persimmon. I don't think I'll ever have closure."

"Closure is an empty thing," he told her flatly, in that aristocratic monotone. "In the end, he'd still be dead."

"True." Depressing as all hell, but true.

They lapsed back into silence, steadily working their way through another bottle. She was going to have _such _a hangover in the morning she'd probably want to cut off her own head, but oh, well. Live in the moment, never worry about tomorrow today.

She found herself looking at Kuchiki again. "Y'know," she mused out of the blue, propping herself up unsteadily on her elbow. "Y'should let me cut your hair."

He blinked at her. Slowly. "I beg your pardon?" His voice wasn't as steady as he'd like it to be, and the corners of his mouth tugged down unhappily.

"Your hair. Let me cut it," she repeated, snipping her fingers together.

"You are drunk," he decided finally after a minute or so of examining her with dubious crinkle to his brow.

"I don't get drunk, but you are too. Let's cut your hair," she insisted, warming up to the idea. She set her glass aside and struggled to sit up. Toppled over and tried again, working to keep her boobs out of the way. It took a bit of effort.

"No."

"Yea-ah. C'mon, Kuchiki-taicho! All the cool kids are doing it."

"No."

"I'll make you look pretty," Rangiku promised.

"No."

She huffed at him. "You're no fun." Then she stopped, blinked, and smacked her lips together with a grimace. "Ugh, my mouth tastes horrible. Like a dead rat."

Kuchiki lifted an imperious brow in her direction, not looking especially impressed with her observation. "You did just recently vacate the contents of your stomach all over my azaleas."

The _duh _was implied.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry about that."

"I am not the one who trims the azaleas. It is of no concern to me," he replied with stiff courtesy. As if he were pedestrian enough to weed his own garden. Ha.

She giggled. "You're such a snob."

He didn't deny it.

…

"So, same time tomorrow night?"

* * *

**AN: **I love Byakuya. I love Rangiku. So I threw them together.

I'd love to hear from you, so please leave a review if you liked this, and even if you didn't.

Peace out. n_n


End file.
